JaSauders

Hi all. Scratching my head here with this one and still striking out... curious if anybody may have any thoughts. We're using Intune, Windows 11 23H2, user driven setups. In a small-ish sample of our student device population, I'm finding that about 10% of our students cannot see all apps in Company Portal as available to install. Specifically, the dividing line seems to be whether the apps are user-behavior install or system-behavior install. To clarify, 100% of our devices can see system-behavior apps, but only 90% can seemingly see user-behavior apps. What's weird is I can't find a difference as I compare a problematic account/device to a working account/device, namely because: - Licenses match - Devices are updated and recently rebooted - Both user accounts are in the exact same group, where that group is what's assigned to the app as available - Both devices are compliant - Both devices are identical (make, model, OS, OS version) Unfortunately there are some MS Store UWP apps I want to make available to Company Portal for students to install on their own, but with a decent portion of our fleet just simply not seeing these apps, it makes it difficult to lean on as a trustworthy app delivery device. What's even more troubling is if I check a problematic device on Intune, it'll say under Managed Apps that an app is available to install (suggesting it's fine) yet on the actual device if I open Company Portal, it's 100% not there... it's as if Intune is straight up lying to me and I have no idea why... Anybody see this before? Really struggling with finding a fault here.

Hi friends. My understanding is that Promethean has discontinued the ActivSlate; something heavily utilized in our district. With spare supplies running out I'm looking for an alternative route going forward. I'm curious if anybody has a similar-to-activslate recommendation. Couple thoughts on the radar to share: 1) I really, really don't fancy the idea of using an actual tablet (Android/iPad), as the penalty for an accidental drop is significantly higher. 2) I'm hopeful that I can find something sustainable. In my search a huge portion of what I'm finding appear to be, do I dare say, knockoffs. The majority of these options don't scream "this company will be here in 3 years", much less a few months. 3) Needs to be wireless and needs to be able to hit the back of a standard sized classroom. 4) Currently surveying the Wacom Intuos tablet, but having some issues with range. Likewise, the sensitivity with interacting with the device isn't quite on par with what we had with the ActivSlates. More testing needed, but so far, it's not feeling like a direct replacement option. The problem is searching for specific devices in this category really blurs the results, as countless other items find their way into my search results that have absolutely nothing to do with what I'm after. Figured I'd ask here to see if anybody is utilizing anything with any degree of success. Would absolutely appreciate any and all insight! Thanks!

I struggled with it a bit. If we go the EOG route, we're limited with basically no transitions, but can control the delay, and it's crazy simple to set up and maintain all the way around. With the SMB link, users with access can drop in images, maintain it the way they want, manage it when they want, etc etc. I had difficulty finding a downside to this, outside of being unable to dress it up with flashy animations and transitions (which really isn't a priority). I mean, we want it to look good, and we can make it look decent via the content/styling on the slides (and IT laying a base-layer with some logo'd images users can work from would help), it just wouldn't be flashy flashy. It being a project that isn't 100% maintained by IT, controlled by IT, and updated by IT is a higher priority. We could lump these things into puppet for automated management, even. I'm trying to pry myself away from this idea in an effort to be open minded, but unless there's a slam dunk crazy awesome amazing "this is exactly what you need, trust me" solution out there that takes EOG's capabilities and builds onto them, yet maintains its simplicity, I may find myself suggesting this to the others and see how it sticks.

Hello friends. I am looking around to see what kind of digital signage solutions there are. We have several RPi's and would like to utilize them for such a task. I've never done digital signage before, so I'm trying to read as much as possible in an effort to see what's involved. I looked into Xibo, which seems to be a popular one based on search results on this forum. Xibo seems to fit the bill well given it's open source and can be installed on Linux. I should mention that we are almost certainly looking into an open source/Linux based solution, as nearly our entire district is running open source software -- even client systems. The thing with Xibo that I wasn't sure about is it appeared as if the Xibo client software for Linux kind of died off. I saw discussion suggesting an alternative route was being considered, but nothing seems to have materialized yet. Likewise, it seemed like the latest Xibo still requires php5, requiring that I downgrade php via a PPA on a 16.04 server that I tested it with. That's... fine I suppose. I could also run with 14.04 as that's supported, but it kind of raised an eyebrow. On a hunch I thought I'd look at a possibly simpler, "out of the box" idea. I came across two, though I question how far these ideas would go in practice. One would utilize VLC, which would auto launch VLC full screened upon starting up the system. So you figure, Linux box, auto login, automatic script to launch VLC playing a predefined video (call it /home/user/Videos/Live.mp4). This, of course, would require that a video be created, but things like Movie Maker, kdenlive, etc could fill that void. The Videos folder could be shared out via Samba, allowing users with access (IT, principals, etc perhaps) to make the content and drop it in the directory. Downside is VLC wigs out if it's not killed first before switching it. So if I rename Live.mp4 to Old-Live.mp4, VLC will go nuts and spam errors, though if you kill VLC, rename the video over SMB to whatever name is being called (i.e. Live.mp4), and kick off the script again backgrounded, it works great. This command idea is something like: vlc --no-video-title --loop --fullscreen /home/user/Videos/Live.mp4 The other was perhaps a simple slideshow. Using EOG (eye of gnome), I can easily kick off an automatic 1 liner bash script (eog --slide-show /home/user/Slideshow/Live) upon auto-login that launches this slideshow. Figure that /home/user/Slideshow is shared out via SMB, with a folder inside called Live. Whatever images are in the Live folder = what would get played. Upside is, there's no killing anything. It just works. I can swap out whatever I want at any point, it'll just carry on through the next loop. The delay can be controlled globally by a dconf key (5 sec default, could be set to whatever). This approach would allow IT, principals, etc to kind of "manage" the individual files within /home/user/Slideshow (Slideshow being SMB'd out), and know whatever they drop in "Live" is... well... live. Downside: Someone has to create the JPGs that would go into this, though between the capabilities of MS Office, LibreOffice, and of course, Gimp, this would be possible. On the upside, folks could get playful with the designs, and IT could even provide some base frames to work from with the school logo, etc, already on it -- just need to add text over top. For the most part, the folks in question outside of IT who I have in mind to maintain the content are capable of managing things like JPG creation. Video creation might be a little more hit and miss, though I suspect (famous last words?) this would be a teachable thing without too much training. The goal is to have something Linux based, light, and reliable. I've read some conflicting reports about certain digital signage solutions that the stream died off for xyz reason, etc. Likewise, for it to be something that folks maintaining their own buildings can manage (i.e. more hands-off from IT, let principals do their thing on their time without having to wait for a tech), would be absolutely great. While elaborate, sophisticated transitions would be nice, at the end of the day we just need something that won't require a ton of focus, maintenance, etc. Like everybody else reading, there's other priorities on the radar, and adding one more thing would be nice to -- well -- kind of avoid. In short, that's where my thoughts lead me. I'm not married to any particular solution. Just trying to dig up some info so I can shove a bunch of ideas on a table and hash out the good/bad/ugly. I wanted to relay my thoughts here to see what others thought. Bad idea? Plausible? Is Xibo more do-able with our platform choice than what I gathered from my reading? Is there a Xibo alternative worth looking into that fits the set-it-and-pretty-much-forget-it paradigm? Open to all ideas. Thanks for any and all suggestions.

It appears as if my issue was related to ia32-libs, which allows 32 bit packages to work with 64 bit systems. I understand that ia32-libs was removed from Ubuntu 13.10. Some blog comments around have suggested this is due to 13.10 coming with better multiarch support. Thing is, the packages have to be built with this in mind. Since Mimio 11.11 was seemingly packaged for ia32-libs, I ran into this brick wall. Again, just pieces of comments stitched together in this synopsis, but it kind of makes sense. For kicks I spun up Ubuntu 13.10 32 bit in a virtual machine. Mimio 11.1 worked fine. This solidified that it was definitely a 32 bit vs 64 bit issue (32 bit package, 64 bit OS). Mimio says they support 64 bit Linux distributions, so this shouldn't be an issue. Ultimately I found a suggestion to install the following: sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libgcc1:i386 gcc-4.6-base:i386 libstdc++5:i386 libstdc++6:i386 Which is, as I understand it, the missing packages that are needed to make 32 bit packages work under a 64 bit OS without the regular ia32-libs package that we've seen in prior releases. Mimio eventually will error out with missing dependencies, but a sudo apt-get install -f should fix that. Once done, Mimio will be installed, but it won't launch until you change the ownership of /home/youruser/.mimio to youruser:youruser, since by default it's root:root. So in short... 1) sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libgcc1:i386 gcc-4.6-base:i386 libstdc++5:i386 libstdc++6:i386 2) sudo apt-get install -f 3) sudo chown -R youruser:youruser /home/youruser/.mimio Attn: Mimio Developers. Please, PLEASE, I cannot stress this enough, please fix these issues. I mean, at the very least, document these things. I've seen absolutely zero documentation on this issue and only came across these steps through reading and troubleshooting. This isn't acceptable. Fixing these issues would really help out a lot of your userbase and save a massive amount of frustration.

So... this isn't entirely solved it seems. I tried to install other software unrelated to Mimio but I hit a brick wall when I had to dpkg --configure -a. Thing is, each time I do that, it hangs indefinitely. With the assistance of another veteran Ubuntu user, we came to the conclusion that the mimio-studio.postinst script was problematic. It was located in /var/lib/dpkg/info I believe. I removed it and ran through the process, which ultimately purged Mimio altogether. This was fine, as Mimio, so far, has been nothing but problems on Linux. For kicks I tried to install the .deb again through Software Center (last time I just did a dpkg -i in terminal), but it would just hang. For more kicks, I spun up a brand new 12.04 LTS VM, but that too was problematic. The veteran user I mentioned above took a look at some of my logs and said immediately that this package was terribly designed, and said bluntly that the developers should be fired. This, of course, is a bit of a concern given our huge Ubuntu deployment we have at work. Granted, currently our Ubuntu deployment is across the vast majority of our student systems and the teachers are not using Ubuntu at the moment (which is where the Mimio software is utilized) but what irks me is Mimio's claim that they support it when it is clearly problematic. That, coupled along with the unknown future (maybe teachers will be on Ubuntu for our next deployment? Who knows), it leaves me a bit concerned. I opened a support request with them but haven't heard back yet. So with that said, I'm curious as to what sort of experiences, issues, troubleshooting, workarounds, and maybe even success stories you guys have had with Mimio on Linux. Anybody?

Nevermind. For some reason the hidden mimio directlry (/home/me/.mimio) was owned by root:root. I changed it to me:me and it works fine. Kind of frustrated I didn't find it sooner, but most importantly, I'm kind of frustrated I didn't see it documented... anywhere... not to mention this isn't really a common problem (at least in my experience) where things written to the home directory are owned by root. I only came across it when I was in bed on my tablet trying to stay awake long enough to Google around more when a user on some random blog post commented about it from an older version of Mimio. On a hunch, I drug my sorry rear end out of bed, ls -l, oh hey... chown'd it up and bingo bango.

Hello friends. I am trying to get the latest Mimio (11.11) working on my Ubuntu 13.10 system. I downloaded the .deb and installed it through software center. I noticed it says i386 at the end and I am on a 64 bit install. I did not see any notations or FYI's about using 32 or 64 bit on their download page so I figured it was okay. It installed without error. Thing is, I can't seem to open it. If I locate Mimio Notebook and launch it, nothing happens. No errors mind you, but simply nothing visibly takes place. If I go into System Monitor, I see a Mimio instance there as if it's running in the background. Yet... I got nothing. Is there a trick to getting Mimio to work without fuss? EDIT: Here's the output... jason@JS-E430:~/Software$ sudo dpkg -i mimio-studio_11.11-0en_i386.deb Selecting previously unselected package mimio-studio. (Reading database ... 261236 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking mimio-studio (from mimio-studio_11.11-0en_i386.deb) ... Setting up mimio-studio (11.11-0en) ... Could not parse file "/usr/share/applications/mimio-collaborate.desktop": Key file contains line '?[Desktop Entry]' which is not a key-value pair, group, or comment update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated) MDKLoadLibrary('/var/opt/mimio/system/aps_componentmanager1.so') failed: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory MDKLoadLibrary('/var/opt/mimio/system/dev_hid1.so') failed: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory MDKLoadLibrary('/var/opt/mimio/system/aps_componentmanager1.so') failed: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory MDKLoadLibrary('/var/opt/mimio/system/aps_projector1.so') failed: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory MDKLoadLibrary('/var/opt/mimio/system/aps_view1.so') failed: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory MDKLoadLibrary('/var/opt/mimio/system/dev_hid1.so') failed: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory MDKLoadLibrary('/var/opt/mimio/system/aps_componentmanager1.so') failed: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory MDKLoadLibrary('/var/opt/mimio/system/aps_projector1.so') failed: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory MDKLoadLibrary('/var/opt/mimio/system/aps_view1.so') failed: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Processing triggers for shared-mime-info ... Unknown media type in type 'all/all' Unknown media type in type 'all/allfiles' Unknown media type in type 'uri/mms' Unknown media type in type 'uri/mmst' Unknown media type in type 'uri/mmsu' Unknown media type in type 'uri/pnm' Unknown media type in type 'uri/rtspt' Unknown media type in type 'uri/rtspu' Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils ... Processing triggers for gnome-menus ... Processing triggers for bamfdaemon ... Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf-2.index... Processing triggers for mime-support ... Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ... update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.11.0-17-generic jason@JS-E430:~/Software$

Since I replied last to this thread, we have introduced nearly 2,000 more Ubuntu laptops to our network, bringing the total number to about 4,000, which very easily constitutes the vast majority of our infrastructure. I've also stopped tinkering with elementary OS as some of its 'design limitations' felt a bit hindersome to me. My wife and mother still use elementary OS and love it, but I've decided to give Ubuntu another clean and clear shot with 13.10, and so far I've found myself thoroughly enjoying it. Once I got in the groove with how Unity works, it really showed me how nice of an interface it is and how efficient you can get things done. Granted, this is just my perspective though, everybody's mileage varies. For me, Linux has always been the key component that ties everything I do together. The particular distro and desktop environment is often up for question, but so far, Ubuntu and Ubuntu based derivatives have always been a top choice. I'm pretty okay with that.

We're facing a growing issue where VHS players are dying and they are not being purchased anymore. Some of the content on these VHS tapes are still valuable, hence why they are still used, but the lack of plentiful VHS players to show the content has been a concern. I began to wonder if we could just rip the VHS's and burn them to DVDs, but I'm unsure of the legalities behind this. I thought I remember reading about some copyright law that allows users to rip/burn/do whatever they want with their media as long as they use it in the same demeanor as the original media intended. In other words, if I have a DVD, I can legally rip that DVD and store it on my personal server. I mean, it's still mine, and I'm still using it in the same way that I did before when I had the DVD. I'm not sure where I read this or even if it's entirely accurate, but it's a vague memory in my mind that is sticking out, so I figured I'd ask. Ultimately I have a feeling the licensing will matter with each individual company who published this media, which would mean having to track down every one of these organizations to ask them this very question. Eh.

Yeah - in this day and age, working on Windows feels like a chore, whereas working on Linux feels like I'm getting crap done so I can close another project, get home, and do my thing with the family. That's not to glorify Linux into some sort of non-problematic beast and to make Windows sound like it's entirely filled with problems, I mean Linux has had its issues too, but based on personal experience of having to manage a few thousand machines on each platform, Windows absolutely takes the cake for requiring more of my time and continually pushes my level of patience. I cannot stress that enough. For the last week I've been using elementary OS, which is an Ubuntu 12.04 (LTS) based distro. So far I really dig it. The degree of minimalism (yet enough features to let me do my job) is huge to me. Regardless of the distro, I love being able to fire up a LiveUSB instance and installing it, 99% of the time without having to worry about drivers (just the occasional wireless driver for those awful Broadcom chips). No licenses to worry about. No bloatware to unload. Just paste my long saved apt-get install command and presto, 10 minutes later I have 30 additional applications installed. At the end of the day, the best operating system is the one that does the job best for your needs. Use what works best for you --- I do.

This looks fantastic. I will look into it asap. THANK YOU!

Hello friends. A question came up today and I'm not too sure what out there exists for this. Reason like this make me wish there was a tech oriented Pinterest (or maybe there's a sub category on Pinterest for tech?). Ha, anyway, so the idea is this. I'm looking for the ability to be on a tablet (within wifi range) or laptop with a web frontend that can control the text input being displayed on a screen inside the building. Think of this use case scenario... I am standing outside. I have a device in my hand on the wifi with the web interface pulled up and logged in. Little Johnny's mom is here. I hit a button and it displays on the flatscreen TV mounted on the wall inside that Johnny Ramone is dismissed. I've heard of projects being done where people put Raspberry Pi's on the back of TVs and feed them the signal via HDMI, and then over the network these Raspberry Pi's are controlled by a centralized mini server of some sort. I just have *no* idea what that software is and am having a hard time with my blind fire Google searches. Figured I'd ask here in case anybody was like "aw yeah totally I just did this with A+++ results."

I've bounced between every Linux distro known to man (or at least the top 20 most common distros you've heard of at least), along with a ton of desktop environments. I have been using Cinnamon and Gnome 3 lately depending on my mood and I enjoy them quite a lot. I do find some 'meh' factors of each one though, but I try to remind myself I'm a spoiled Linux user with endless choice. If I was on Mac or Windows, I wouldn't have any of that choice period. Lately I've been spending most of my time on elementary OS, which is Ubuntu based (big bonus for me) and easy to use yet can do all of the complex tasks I need to at work. It helps that my place of work (public school district) has been migrated from a largely Apple-centric district to a Linux-oriented district with a handful of Windows 8 systems in the mix. I really enjoy my job, because I get to use iOS/Android/Chromebooks/OSX/Win7/Win8/Linux all in one environment. I can tell you one thing too... there are times on Linux where I admittedly get frustrated, and because prior to this job I spent literally all of my time on Linux, I couldn't help but to think "maybe I should just get a Mac, or get Windows, and be done with it". As time passes and as I use OSX, Windows, and Linux more and more, I can assure you one thing: No operating system is perfect, and today's Linux environments aren't as problematic (in comparison to other platforms) as some people (still) make them out to be. If it's a piece of software, it's going to have its quirks and problems.

Blunt 2c: I really couldn't care less what looks too much like Apple and what looks too much like Windows. I need an operating system that gets in my way when I need it to, out of my way when I need it to, to be simple to use yet advanced when I need to complete a task that matters. In all of the distros I've used, Elementary OS has delivered all of those parameters to the fullest. I still use other distros, and have a ton of interest still vested in Gnome 3, Cinnamon, Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, etc., but eOS has been a nice experience for me, whether at home or at work. I do have to say, I used to be a firm believer in using a distro that is best tailored to the user's needs and abilities, and I still find that to be somewhat true, but I have found this "crazy simple to use" yet "does all of the advanced tasks I need it to" cocktail to be one I really enjoy. I love being able to use the same distro for my job that I would recommend to, literally, any family member of any experience level.

Can I ask why that would be the way to go? Also, our machines that we ran into with this weren't even added to the domain yet...

I've ran Linux on my desktop since 2005/2006, or somewhere around there. I built my first computer and was super excited about it. I was working at a miniature golf course through school and had no money once I was done buying the parts. Needless to say I was a little depressed about the fact I couldn't afford a Windows license... My cousin suggested I try Linux, as he swore by it. I have since been on Linux since then on all of my systems. My wife, mother, and aunt run Linux as well. It's been a very solid experience for all of them as they've had less issues with maintaining the systems, which makes me happy since I'm so damn busy these days that to manage family systems every few weeks is asking a lot. At my place of work (school district), we've incorporated a truckload of Linux systems on the desktop (well, laptop). We currently have 1,600 units and will be obtaining 1,700 more by the year's end... all Ubuntu. I love what I do.

I work in a large public school district as a technician. We have decided to bump up our Windows clients to Windows 8 (with ClassicShell, of course, to bring back a usable menu). As we were building the image another tech noticed that the metro apps were not starting. Yet on Friday we left when they were working absolutely fine, and here they are not. What I'm worried about is, what if a teacher gets attached to the Metro apps and begins relying on them for whatever reason... and then magically they stop working. By no stretch of the imagination do I accept the wildly passed around answer of "Just create a new user and you'll be fine!" Yeah, no. That said, yes, when I create another local user, it acts absolutely fine on that account.

We're in the process of porting our student systems (several thousand) to Ubuntu Linux. Our elementary does not use AD integration, however middle school and high school do. We use Likewise (which was bought by another company and possibly under a different name now, but still works the same) to bind them to the domain which gives them the abiity to log in as their MS AD name. We joined them to the domain via terminal, using a command something to the degree of (pulling this from memory weeks ago) sudo domainjoin-cli join DOMAINHERE.NET domain-admin-name-you're-authenticating-as-to-join On the note of supporting Ubuntu full time, as long as you have the supported software you need, there's little attraction to stay with Microsoft or OSX. Gimp 2.8 has plugged some SERIOUS gaps and is an incredible program versus Photoshop. Lots of alternatives for others exist as well. Libre Office has been solid and has a great following. Really the big thing lacking as of now is games, but even that may be changing as Steam's lead developer/owner/CEO/whoever the top dog over there is actually (personally) working on porting the Steam client... along with one of their popular engines, which would bring multiple games to Linux. That said, most business/office environments don't need games, so that may be a moot point for most on these boards. On my personal systems, I made the switch in 2006 - haven't looked back yet.

Didn't you know? Everything (somehow) looks like OSX. On topic - I assume this feature is Likewise based? Very nice addition indeed. I wonder if Unity (being it has some Gnome roots) would get this feature as well.

Are the cameras connected to the box with regular BNC connections, and then the actual DVR itself has an ethernet port (and therefore an IP address) for you to access? Or are the cameras true network based cameras where they draw their own IP addresses via DHCP and then the box is configured for those cameras addresses specifically? If the cameras are BNC based, but the box is network based, I'm not sure how you can draw the stream. If they are network based, I would think SOMEHOW you should be able to. My cameras are true network cameras (Vivotek) and are even POE based, but I had to dig in the manual to find the exact URL's to use... and even that took me a degree of patience and reading I didn't know I had.

I run CCTV on my personal property at home. I use software known as "Motion" on my Linux server (even made a YouTube guide for it . I've been down the ZoneMinder road... I love that software so much... but frequently with my 1 mpx outdoor CCTV network based camera, I would come home to find ZM had lost connection to it and populated thousands of errors in the error log. It began happening frequently enough that I decided to find alternatives, especially since I wanted my CCTV software to be a bit more reliable. Motion was the winning ticket. The nice thing about ZoneMinder is you can tailor it so much... but with a home renovation and a wedding coming up, I cared more about getting drywall done than playing games with software... since Motion worked beautifully for me, I haven't looked back. Despite it not having a GUI for setting it up, it's config file is rather easy to use. Plus config files make for easy backups of my settings, which is a total win for me. Getting more on topic, hate to drop the bomb here since you already have a CCTV setup, but when I was searching for CCTV cameras/software/etc., if the platform supported IE only, I immediately looked elsewhere. If the manufacturer was not competent enough to support other far more popular browsers, then I wasn't going to bother with them. That being said, by buying just the cameras (no DVR or NVR) and using Motion on my server, I circumvented that entire situation all together. While Motion does not have a GUI for setting things up, it does have a "webcam server" to allow you to go to the IP address of the camera and view the feed right in a web browser. IE in Linux is going to be a tough break. Last I heard, IE6 is the last one that is supported in Linux through Wine. I hear there are IE-esque plugins available for Firefox and Chrome that mimic IE's operation, but I'm not sure how well they work. Likewise, I agree, VLC (and Totem) are solid options as they support live streams. That's actually how I check my cameras... I have an LCD monitor hooked into my server, which is right next to my desktop system... so when I'm on my desktop, I turn the server monitor on and right there is Totem which I leave running @ fullscreen with my backdoor camera feed. It makes it nice because I'm often downstairs in the office area with the music ramped up, and seeing the back door allows me to see if anybody comes by to visit when I don't hear the door bell. The only thing I'm trying to figure out is how I can get a "tiled" setup to be viewing multiple streams within VLC or Totem, such as this image: The streams in particular are going to depend on exactly what you're capturing. My camera supports 3 streams... H264, MPEG4, and MJPG. Because of that, I have to make sure I know which stream is doing what. Within my camera interface I can select the streams accordingly, so I can say: stream1 = 1280x800, 30fps, H264 stream2 = 1280x800, 30fps, MPEG4 stream3 = 640x480, 15fps, MPEG4 etc... It also tells me within the interface that I am to use the "live1.sdp" extension on the URL, with the number refering to the stream preset as I said above. So if my IP is 192.168.1.10, and I want to view stream 2 in VLC: rtsp://192.168.1.10/live2.sdp and I'd see it accordingly. If I had a username/password on the camera, VLC/Totem comes up first asking for it, then I see the feed. You can also utilize the MJPG stream, which is motion JPG... meaning a series of JPG pictures snapped consistently to create the video feed... If I understand correctly, MJPG is one of the simplest and most supported ways to capture video feed. No ridiculous patents or licensing or whatever it is that H264 is riddled with. In the case of the MJPG URL, I believe for me it is something like: http://192.168.1.10/video4.mjpg (as I understand, H264/MPEG4 = rtsp, while MJPG = http... could be wrong though, but if I recall, I think that's what I used) The key is, these streams will be different from one camera to another, to another, to another, etc. You may need to do some digging in the user manual (if you don't have it, see if you can find a PDF version online... that's how I lucked out), or worst case scenario, give the company a call and ask. Either way, VLC/Totem should do the trick fine for viewing feeds. It's just the URL that sounds like the tricky part. Fun FYI - One thing I love about network cameras is I can forward them through my router, so within IP Cam Viewer on my Android phone (not sure what apps [if any] exist for iPhone) I can save my cameras within the app. That way I can look on my phone to see if my puppy has destroyed another pillow, basket, or any other random object he can sink his teeth into.

I'm not sure if I can help, but I'll throw some things on the table here (some of which that were already covered) that I ran into with my Linux RAID setup... While I did this on Ubuntu, what I'm seeing from your thread sounds familiar enough. Basically I created a RAID 1 mirror using mdadm software RAID built within Linux. While /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc are "clients" to the RAID, you do not have any usable file system until you format /dev/md0. /dev/md0 acts as the combined disk array... What does any disk need to function? A file system, and of course a mount point. So I popped into GParted, selected /dev/md0, and created an EXT4 file system. Once done, I had to edit /etc/fstab (as notated above) to be available on boot. Then once I rebooted, presto - it was there. I did this for both my server (where the RAID 1 is mounted as /media/NAS) and my personal desktop (where the RAID 1 is mounted as /home). Now, about permissions... there's 100 ways you could do this... So let's say your mount point is /media/raid1... root:root 755 permissions = root owner has full reign, while root group has read/execute, and of course your user would fall under the "others" category, giving you only read/execute. But don't worry... if you create (as root) as directory underneath the mount point, such as /media/raid1/daughtersname, you could assign permissions to that folder.... and basically do becky:becky with proper read/write permissions, and she'd be fine. You could also block off the array completely from other users... What I did, for no other reason than "why not", was I created a group called users... and within that group I added every system user to it. Then I changed the group of the array so it reflected users and also set myself (jason) to be owner, so overall it looked like jason:users. Then I set the permissions to be 750... That means jason had full reign, users had read/execute, and lastly NOBODY else had access. That way, if you're me (jason), you can create folders all you want right in the top level, such as /media/raid1/becky, /media/raid1/fred, etc... meanwhile, for folders beneath it I assigned permissions for that specific user so they had proper read/write permissions. That basically means: /media/raid1 = jason:users 750 (jason can do anything, users can read/execute, and others have no access) *** becky and fred were added to the group "users" *** /media/raid1/becky = becky:becky 755 (becky owner can do anything, becky group has read/execute, others have read/execute) /media/raid1/fred = fred:fred 755 (fred owner can do anything, fred group has read/execute, others have read/execute) Then of course if you want becky's documents to be 100% locked down so NOBODY else could get in, you can set the permissions to 750 so all others were blocked out. Lots of choice here. With me being owner of the main folder, it allows me to create folders all I want without needing to be root. Not to say creating folders as root is hard to do or bad or anything like that... no not at all... but I think what we're getting into here is a bit of personal preference. You could always 777 the mount point as well. Foolish? Quite. But would it work? Oh yes, it would work. I think it'd be more worthwhile to just assign permissions in a way that works for you. Remember, for good security I'd aim to be as locked down as possible while still allowing your users to get their job done. Now on the backup topic, I am curious as to how your daughter is going to back up. I assume you've got DDNS set up so she can point to a dynamic web address instead of a public IP address that could change over time? What operating system is your daughter using? What application is doing the actual backups? Is it going to be regular data backup, like with using rsync that just has a 1:1 raw file backup, or is it going to be an incremental backup where it does a fresh backup every so often? I would assume a university would have a decent upload speed, so she could likely be firing out documents to you without too much struggle... as long as your download is half decent (even my basic DSL is 12-15 mbps down, which I found surprising). How often is this backup going to run?

As somebody who participated in the extremely early testing stages of Gnome Shell, I'll be the first to say I absolutely loved Gnome Shell. It's an incredibly intuitive interface. Once I got used to it, I was hooked. When Ubuntu 11.04 came out, I gave Unity a solid shot, just as I had done with Gnome Shell early on. 11.04's rendition of Unity sent me into a borderline homicidal rage, so I stayed away from it. 11.10's variant was better, but far from a home run. 12.04's edition of Unity has not only improved itself, but it's actually surpassed the shortcomings Gnome Shell had all along, such as the incredibly terrible printer manager, network manager interface, and certain apps not getting called to attention in the notification bar as they should have. Don't get me wrong, Gnome Shell is pretty great to use. 12.04's Unity has not only evolved into a very awesome desktop environment, but it actually claimed the spot as my preferred desktop environment. One year ago, I never would have thought...

I'm not too familiar with Red Hat. Does Red Hat have a "check CD for defects" option like Ubuntu does? That would be my first guess, along with comparing the downloaded ISO's MD5's just to have some extra assurance. Very strange, though...